


Steady

by doublejoint



Series: peachtober 2020 [30]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: KNBxNBA, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:56:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27305941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: Patience is a virtue.
Relationships: Himuro Tatsuya/Kagami Taiga
Series: peachtober 2020 [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953295
Kudos: 5





	Steady

**Author's Note:**

> #peachtober day 30: Balloon

Patience is a virtue. Taiga’s father always told him that when he’d had to wait for something, like lunch or dinner or a school vacation or some sort of promised reward. To an extent, that’s true, but patience is only a virtue when something is worth waiting for and you can’t just go and grab it yourself. In basketball, that’s only a small slice of the time; it’s usually better to make a move, force your opponent on the defensive, unless you’re running out the clock (and even then, Taiga’s a proponent of padding your lead as much as you can). Even when you can’t commit, if you fake committing, pretend to make a move, you can recover in time--or, that’s really the only way Taiga ever plays. He’s lucky; he’s young; he’s got good instincts. Those won’t all be true forever, but for now he can afford to be impatient.

Tatsuya, though, is all patience, letting his opponent screw up, trip over his own feet, commit or even fake committing to blow by him and then Tatsuya’s stolen the ball back, just waiting for the right moment; he waits until the last second to release the ball; he considers all of his options. Conservative, perhaps, but the word’s too ugly and clunky, evocative of black-and-white pictures, short shorts and Chucks, long twos, rote fundamentals. That's not Tatsuya’s style at all, though it was built on top of that, more or less. But that’s not the same thing, is it?

Tatsuya’s not very patient with himself, though. He’s always waiting for the floor to fall away beneath his feet, always angry with himself before it even happens that he hadn’t gotten to high enough ground. Or he’s holding onto a balloon, trying not to overinflate it or let him carry away, deep in the details and deep in himself. Taiga wants to tell him it’s okay, that it will be okay, but he can’t know that for certain.

It’s easier if you believe it will, and Tatsuya is so rarely easy on himself. He’s afraid to take his foot off the pedal, eyes off the road for an instant, and Taiga can’t make him change--he doesn’t want Tatsuya to change, but he doesn’t want him to keep making things difficult for himself, moving the goalposts arbitrarily, denying himself things he wants himself to have.

* * *

There’s not a single point in time when Taiga realizes he’s looking at everything all wrong, through the wrong lens, so that everything looks distorted. Things gradually fall into place, and Tatsuya lets him in more, when he means to and when he doesn’t, staying the night and wearing one of Taiga’s old shirts, looking at him in a way that’s so easy to read, trying out a new dribble that’s still sloppy and half-formed against Taiga on the practice courts--he’s still playing to win, of course.

And that’s what Tatsuya needs, for himself. He needs to pull out every option; he needs to be able to face himself and say he’d done all he could, even if it turns out not to be enough (though it is enough more often than Tatsuya’s willing to admit). He needs to play to win, and as tense as he gets (and the more tense he gets, the more relaxed he looks to anyone who isn’t paying enough attention) he’d be even more tightly-wound if he could blame himself for phoning it in, too. It’s not that Tatsuya shouldn’t be more patient with himself because of this, but--Taiga gets a little more of why he’s not. He’s afraid that if he slackens his grip on the wire it will all pull back on him and slice into his palms.

* * *

There’s a road trip to New York halfway through October, when the leaves have started to turn (they’ve looked yellow in Chicago since August, though Taiga’s never sure if that’s from the light hitting them in a certain way, or a lack of chlorophyll because there are so many other damn trees to crowd them out) but the air is still warm. Air conditioners are still dripping on the street, and the background hum coming from Tatsuya’s next-door neighbors’ apartment is their window unit.

“They leave it on all night,” Tatsuya says. “Sometimes when I get up in the morning I’m just waiting for them to turn it off.”

“Why at night?” says Taiga.

“Maybe they’re having loud sex?”

Taiga snorts. “All night?”

Tatsuya shrugs, smiling. Taiga thinks, suddenly, how good, how relaxed Tatsuya looks right here, how there’s no tension keeping his shoulders in the perfect position or his head tilted at an exact angle. How he can’t notice it too much, or Tatsuya will notice him noticing and freeze up, but regardless, that Tatsuya can loosen up this much around him is good. (That maybe, Taiga’s patience with Tatsuya has rubbed off on him, like syrup on his hands.)

* * *

“Thank you,” Tatsuya says, when they’re driving on the highway in the early evening, stalled in traffic. “For waiting.”

The car ahead of them inches up; Tatsuya follows as the brake lights ahead of them cascade. It’s dark enough to see them all starkly, close enough to sunset that they won’t get home until after they’d be able to see the stars if they lived somewhere with a little less smog and light pollution. 

“Always,” Taiga says. 

Tatsuya bites his lip, as if he might cry or blurt out something he still isn’t ready to say, then tucks a lock of hair behind his ear. Taiga reaches out over the console and puts his hand on Tatsuya’s knee, and Tatsuya covers it with his own until the car in front of them eases ahead again. Tatsuya turns the volume down on the news radio station; they don’t need that to know that the traffic sucks on pretty much every route they can take from here. They’ll get to where they’re going eventually, and it’s enough for now that Tatsuya believes they will, too. 


End file.
